For those that have been watching Git (and who hasn’t, everyone loves looking at commits, right?) you would have seen some commits hinting at the release of the new FreePBX Distro 7.
This is getting pretty close to being available for beta, and we’ve been using it internally for a while.
I expect that, barring anything catastrophic, there will be the first public release very soon - early to middle of next week.
There’s a couple of changes from our previous Distros that I’d like to mention, that will probably get filled out more in a blog post, but here’s a couple of the cool new hotness things that I’m happy about
- No more FreePBX Distro Updater scripts. It’s just ‘yum update’. Always. You can also ‘yum downgrade’, too. (This doesn’t change FreePBX’s module versions, as per normal. This is just Distro)
- Complete UEFI support
- Serial and USB installs just work. (In fact, it’s much faster to install from USB than from ISO now – so much so that installing from USB may be the recommended method of installation, with ISOs as a fallback)
- Better development environment - If you want to develop FreePBX, you can just run ‘yum install freepbx-devel’ and that gets the machine ready for you.
- Behind the scenes, all RPM updates are automated, making it a lot easier for us to push out fixes without needing to run 15 different steps to push repos out to all the CDNs.
- PHP 5.6 and FreePBX 14
There are a couple of downsides. For one, there will no longer be any i686 support. 64 bit only. Being that it’s been impossible to buy 32 bit CPUs for almost 10 years now, we think that’s fair. Secondly, as this is a beta release, it will probably be broken in horrible and arcane ways. It may even kick your cat. No promises.
If you have any questions or suggestions, this is the place to post them!